Acne Scar Treatment

 Lot of people suffer from acne and then after acne develops scars so you have to treat your acne before you can actually treat the acne scars. There are two main types of scars ,you have the pigment changes after the inflammation and then you have true scars which are structural defects or changes. It's really critical to know what kind of acne scars you have because you can say acne scars and that's such a broad category.  When you know what kind of acne scars you have then you can target your treatment to what's causing them and so with the pigment changes you have post-inflammatory erythema and that's red spots on the skin then you have post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation which is dark spots on the skin and then when we look at the ones that are actually true scars you can either have atrophic acne scars which are punched out areas of skin or you can have hypertrophic acne scars which are actually elevated parts of the skin. So once you put your scars into a category then you can tailor your skincare routine to target those scars. 

Post-inflammatory erythema is probably the most common and it's also the one that's going to occur most immediately following acne after you've treated it so these are the little red spots that are on the skin after the acne bump is there so the good news about post-inflammatory erythema is it does resolve on its own with no treatment as long as you're treating the underlying acne. 

Post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation or the dark spots you get after acne and people with darker skin tones are more likely to get this. This lasts a little bit longer than the red spots probably three to six months to a year for the dark spots to go away on their own. They do often just get better with time to time. But this is something to be concerned because it lasts a little bit longer you may want to hasten the resolution so there's a couple thought processes ,either you could try to speed up the cell turnover or you could try to exfoliate the skin that's actually going to help quite a bit as well and the third thing is you can actually go after the way that pigment is produced. For treating this , the most critical thing for this hyperpigmentation is going to be the use of sunscreen, tinted sunscreens specifically with iron oxides are going to give you the best benefit to protect against hyperpigmentation. There are really so many ingredients that can work for this anything that treats hyperpigmentation or just pigmentation and it probably is going to have some value these include retinoids, tranexamic acid and niacinamide maybe even something like thiamidol which is a more novel ingredient, vitamin c , azelaic acid , hydroquinone there's just so many ingredients. 

So if you are somebody who has acne and is prone to hyperpigmentation there are two ingredients because they both treat the acne and the hyperpigmentation and so that's going to be  retinoids again and azelaic acid and so if you're still having acne and you're trying to treat your dark spots these are the two ingredients.

Hypopigmentation so these are just like light spots that occur after the acne bumps and what's happening here is the inflammation like consumes and damages the pigment making cells the melanocytes and they just get destroyed or they just become not functional and so these spots can be permanent they can fade over a long period of time like a year but they can be permanent and actually not a lot of treatments are going to help bring them back. and there's one thing that you can kind of help to see if it's going to come back or not. If you have hair in this area so this is going to be maybe somebody who has you know maybe facial hair or something like this and you can see  if your hair has pigment in that area within the scar area or there's hair follicles nearby that have pigment then there's a better chance that you'll repigment this area because melanocytes from the hair follicle can travel and try to repair that area but once hypopigmentation forms it can be one of the most difficult things to treat you may actually need something called the melanocyte transfer, which is a very very nuanced procedure that's done by plastic surgeons .

True acne scars are all atrophic or sunken in scars and then we have the hypertrophic scars but they're treated completely differently. In this case, the inflammation is pretty deep so because this inflammation scarring can start at the deeper layers of the skin this forms a scar through and through the skin and it's just much more than just a surface problem. So some of these topical products like retinoids they just don't get deep enough into the skin a lot of times to get after these deep acne scars which is why these atrophic acne scars are so difficult to treat and which is why unfortunately seeing a dermatologist is going to give you the best results for these acne scars.

 The treatment options includes micro needling. what is microneedling? so micro needling is basically you poke little holes into the skin with sterile device clean head and poking little holes in the skin end up stimulating collagen production that can release those deep acne scars and kind of poof them up a little bit so that they can become level with the rest of the skin. They sort of work is that they have anti-aging benefits they help with pigmentation they're safe for most skin tones which a lot of things are not necessarily scary for all skin tones.  Microneedling can be done only in clinics by dermatologists.

Next treatment option this is just your chemical peels there's such a variable degree of these that can be effective and they all work in different ways so chemical peels are actually a pretty complicated topic and people have dedicated their whole careers to basically being the chemical peel person.  you can have a medium depth chemical peel or you can have a deep depth of chemical peel and that's going to have different effects.